Microformat Issues

Some issues may be ACCEPTED and perhaps cause changes or improved explanations in one or more specifications or microformats in general. Some issues may be REJECTED for a variety of brief reasons, and others contain longer discussions.

As this is a general microformats issues page, please only note concrete real world issues. Theoretical issues may be deleted, as will any issues raised that do not contain documentation of specific real-world examples that use real-world microformats (not just brainstorms).

Please be sure that an issue applies to more than one microformat or pattern, otherwise the issue should be raised on the format/pattern specific issues page. Please check issues-resolved and issues-closed to first see if your issue has a resolution.

Submitted issues may (and probably will) be edited and rewritten for better terseness, clarity, calmness, rationality, and as neutral a point of view as possible. Write your issues well. — Tantek

Resolved Issues

Issues

opened 2006

why does hCard use "vcard" as the root class or hCalendar use "vevent"?

Originally partly an FAQ written by Brian Suda, this slight inconsistency between the name of the format and the name of the root class name consistently causes confusion in a large percentage of newcomers to microformats. - Tantek

I always end up saying "vcard" instead of "hcard" because I never write "hcard" in the code. It's weird having "two" formats that are 1:1.

Ambiguity in discussions, e.g. put "vcard" in your HTML - meaning, class name, or a link to a .vcf file?

Cognitive load: extra bit of information to remember when marking up a microformat

in contrast to hReview, hListing, hRecipe, etc. which all have root class name same as name of microformat (albeit lowercased, however some publishers have used the 2nd-letter-uppercase version as the root class name, e.g. class="hReview", enough for Google's rich snippet parsers to liberally accept it, so those could be improved as well.).

Though in microformats we believe very strongly in the principle of reuse, we have to admit that in this case experience/evidence has shown that this may be a case where we re-used something too far beyond it's original meaning. Or perhaps we errantly called two slightly different things by the same name.

ACCEPTED PROPOSED RESOLUTION. In microformats-2, all vocabularies are named the same as their root class names, e.g. "h-card", "h-event", "h-entry" etc. - Tantek

opened 2010

microformats classes like 'url' or 'region' already in use. "Using class for the microformat markup is clearly a problem, in part because it’s so easy to overlap with other markup. Authors use classes like “url” or “region” all the time, and might not be aware of the hCard format. All sorts of markup might look like a microformat."

There has also been an anecdotal report of a design firm who was not (yet) familiar with microformats seeing the "extra" classes that "that don't seem to be used" (without corresponding CSS rules) and asking if they "can remove them". By making microformats class names different from generic words, authors unfamiliar with microformats may at least notice such distinction and infer special functionality accordingly. - Tantek

ACCEPTED. Pretty sure this was raised before, in IRC/lists elsewhere, but this URL was the earliest one I could find to capture it. - Tantek

opened 2011

Issues opened/raised in 2011.

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